What Makes Me Laugh

Here’s the thing. I could be wrong about this. Way wrong. So wrong that I can imagine a laughing advice columnist sputtering coffee all over my letter before she advises medication. And yet, I wonder if I’m right? I wonder if our neighbors really don’t like us. I mean, really? Who wouldn’t like us?

We live in a relatively quiet small town in Montana in a relatively quiet neighborhood. Our house is on the corner of two streets, which means that our backyard intersects with the backyards of our two closest neighbors — Steph and Adam, Barb and Nate. This is our micro-neighborhood, if you will. Since we share a wooden fence with both parties, we know them fairly well. Plus, Doug and Barb work together, so that makes it even cozier. 

Our macro-neighborhood is a little less intimate with us, but no less interesting.

For instance Tom, our neighbor across the street, is a man I knew little about up until a couple of years ago. He wears his long, white hair back in a ponytail and seems to have a semi-annual run-in with the law. The rumor is that his next-door neighbors called the police because he was keeping a horse in his backyard, and the police had to persuade him to find a bigger pasture for his animal. Which is funny, since we lived with a rooster next door for two years, and fantasized calling the cops every time the rooster woke us up at ungodly hours of the morning.

Anyway, Doug was working in our front yard when Tom first  introduced himself. He said he had  heard us jamming one evening. Turns out he plays guitar too, and I’ve heard him sing Neil Young covers on his porch in a wan, sad way a few times. Doug trotted over to his house to see his fossil collection and hear stories of Tom backing up the band, “Ten Years After” and other tall tales.

But then Tom decided to show up on our doorstep one morning dead drunk, with a guitar strapped around his back and a harmonica to his lips.

“Is your old man in?” he asked, and I let him inside to share the song he wrote with us. Tom walked into the middle of our living room, took a wide cowboy stance while we watched from the kitchen (we were canning tomatoes) and belted out a nifty original tune sung  in the style of Neil Young. It expressed his sincere love for his ex-wife, and his sincere regret that she gave all of their money away to the local cult. It’s hard to rhyme with the words “Church Universal Triumphant” but I gave him points for trying. After the song, he explained that he hoped to reconcile with his wife and ran after her truck the last time he saw her to see if he could jump in the back and break out her back window with his fist as a gesture of his love (and I’m assuming anguish). “I think she might have come back to me,” he said. Too bad he can’t run faster than 5 miles an hour.

It’s been two years since Tom’s serenade and I still hide in the backyard when I see him venture onto the sidewalk. Not that he’s dangerous, but the whiskey and women and junk cars kind of preclude the kind of neighborly relationship where you barbecue together.  Sometimes you can know too much about your neighbor to be friends, without even trying.